As threats to email security grow ever more sophisticated and aggressive, organisations have an increasing need for rigorous, effective and manageable protection.
Business needs
Email is a critical business tool, and its benefits are well-documented. However, with such importance and dependency comes responsibility, and, if your email security is not up to scratch, the chances of suffering potentially damaging consequences are greatly increased.
Failure to properly protect against the myriad threats faced by email clients can lead to networks creaking under the strain of unsolicited messages and downtime caused by email-borne malware threats – whilst any data leakage can result in sensitive information finding its way into the wrong hands.
It is crucial for any business to negate these risks, and to do so without diminishing the value email brings to an organisation.
Meeting the challenges
The goal is to ensure email is a genuine asset to your business, and not a drain on resources – that means finding ways to block spam and ever-evolving security threats without impairing the user experience, ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, and empowering users to safeguard their own in and outbound traffic without blinding them with science.
Conventional email infrastructure generally comprises anti-virus software, anti-spam appliances, encryption tools, and data loss prevention solutions – often managed on-premise and via a set of separate or even disparate interfaces. With all constituents subject to near-constant monitoring and upgrades, managing such a complex web of ancillary solutions and services can be a time-consuming and costly business.
Email security in the cloud
Any worthwhile solution must, first and foremost, deliver robust and uncompromising protection. Cloud-based solutions can offer just that, whilst consolidating multiple solutions to ensure that all aspects of email security can be managed centrally from a single web-based console. This reduces the complexity and costs usually associated with managing email security.
A cloud-delivered security system means moving away from on-premise infrastructures, which is both more cost-efficient than secure encryption software and helps you maintain greater control, without compromising on security.
Providers of cloud-based security update their own technologies and definitions on a regular, often daily basis, giving your IT staff the opportunity to focus on more strategic business activities. In and outbound emails are sent and received via the cloud and screened before release, which significantly lightens the load on Exchange. Meanwhile, threats are removed before they even reach on premise systems, and legitimate email is more efficiently processed.
These days there are many cloud-security offerings on the market, so it is worth considering:
- Does the security system allow for end-user self-service?
- Are any changes in policy automatically and directly applied?
- Is it supported by robust SLAs, including 100% service availability, 100% virus protection and well over 90% spam protection?
Jorge Nunes, IT Manager with the BKS Group, believes Mimecast’s Email Security provides a simple yet comprehensive solution:
“Spam and viruses were a big problem before Mimecast. The spammers change their tricks every day. We can now see the thousands of malicious and unwanted email messages being trapped by the filters, which work so well that it has become normal not to receive spam, and we’ve never had a virus come through since we moved to Mimecast.”